Men in Green (26 page)

“Do you know how many times I heard him tell that story?” Conni said. “No, that never happened.” There was no defiance in her voice. It was sad, if anything. “I remember it was sort of a scramble to get tickets, and we got them at the very last minute. I don't believe we were sitting anywhere near the stage, and I don't even know how Carol Channing could have known we were there. She never sang those words. But a lot of things Ken claimed never happened. He believed them, but they never happened.”

Conni remembered the
SI
story I wrote about Ken in 1997. She especially remembered the scene in which Ken shows me the tape of his '64 U.S. Open win.

On the tape Venturi sinks his winning putt. With his hands and nose pointed up, he mouths the words “My God, I have won the Open.” He turns the tape off hastily.

“Don't they show the trophy presentation?” a visitor asks.

“I think I had them edit that out,” Venturi says. “I don't like Beau to have to see Conni,” he adds, referring to his wife, who's in another room, and his former wife, who lives in Northern California.

He continues to play the tape. There has been no editing. There is Conni Venturi—movie-star beautiful—embracing the winner.

“This is all show,” Venturi says. “We're already headed for a divorce.”

The phrase “who lives in Northern California” was added by an editor in fact-checking. I had nothing to do with it. I hadn't been able to locate Conni and filed the story not even knowing if she was alive.

Reading that story hurt Conni. The way I told it, it was all Ken. For that, I can only blame my inadequate reporting and myself. I should have found Conni and included her. I was writing about the dissolution of a marriage and had only one side.

Conni said, “I never understood why he said that,” that they were heading for divorce. She said the marriage had issues, but there had been no discussion of divorce. Their focus was on making things better.

“We went to a Catholic church in Washington that week at Congressional. We actually knocked on the door of the parish house next door and asked them to open up the church, and they did. The parish priest prayed with us. That was the night before the first round of the Open.”

Ken and Conni made a deal that night: If he won the U.S. Open, Conni would start taking Matt and Tim to church. That is, his church. Ken didn't want the boys going to the Presbyterian church with their mother anymore. He wanted all four of them in the same pew at his Sunday-morning Mass.

Conni showed no anger at being left out of the '97
SI
story. I'm sure she was used to it. Ken's version of their marriage was the official one, the public one, because he was famous and she was not. I could see the sexism I had brought to my reporting and how I wrote in the thrall of Ken's celebrity and success. I made a vow not to make that mistake again.

Conni was eighty and open, intensely so. She had been enduring the cancer wars (colon). She was a devout Christian who often used the phrase
God bless you
. She was sometimes torn between protecting the public image of her only husband, chiefly for the benefit of her sons, and her desire to portray for once her version of her life.

In one conversation, she talked about what fun the player parties were in the fifties and sixties and how smashed some of the players and wives would get. She did not omit herself or Ken. She described a life that had a certain
Mad Men
sensibility. Not across the board, but in places. Intentions were pointed in her direction. They were not, she said, reciprocated. Not ever. This conflicted with something Ken had told others, that Conni had been (to use the word he used with me) “unfaithful.” Conni said the opposite was true.

She said that in 1966 or '67, she had heard Ken was having an affair with a “barmaid at a key club.” That is, a female bartender at a private club where members put their drinks on a running tab and proved their membership by showing a key. Conni went to the bar with three of her friends. She asked the barmaid in question for a martini, and the barmaid asked to see Conni's key.

“I don't have one, but my husband does,” Conni said. “I'm Mrs. Ken Venturi.”

The other woman's jaw practically hit the bar.

“I tipped her two quarters,” Conni said. “My friends said I shouldn't have tipped her at all, but I thought that was more humiliating, giving her the two quarters.

“When Ken came home that night, I put out two fists. I opened one hand and said, ‘Here's your friend at the bar.' I opened the other one and said, ‘Here are the kids and me. You have to choose.' He said, ‘I want you and the kids.' He was crying like a baby. But he never stopped seeing her.”

Yet if Ken saw Conni having an intimate conversation with any famous man at a party—Arnold Palmer, James Garner, Chuck Connors—he would erupt on the way home. Or even not so famous. In good times, and there were many, they would look at the modest and dutiful wife of this player or that one and joke about how much happier Ken would have been had he married “a little brown wren.” Instead, he was stuck with a Sophia Loren look-alike.

When Conni suggested that Ken sign on with Mark McCormack, Arnold's agent and the founder of IMG, he became furious. He became furious when she made any sort of business suggestion. “I want you to be my wife, not my business manager!” he once yelled at her, as Conni recalled it.

She talked about Ken's collection of firearms, ten or twelve guns plus a gold-plated pistol given to him by Jerry Lewis after a night at the Lewis house when the comedian and the golfer practiced their Quick Draw McGraw routines. She said Ken would wave a gun around when he had been drinking, and that on one occasion he accidently fired a shot in their house. She said that one year at the Pine Inn, a popular hotel among the golfers playing in the Crosby, Ken locked her in a giant rectangular suitcase for several minutes, letting her out only because of her hysterical screaming. She said Ken was an alcoholic and that his drinking made his behavior erratic. She said Ken's biological father had been an alcoholic, too.

I had learned about Ken being adopted by Fred from a friend of Ken's. Conni was surprised that I knew about it. She said she had never talked about it with anybody. Over the years, she had heard many of the wise sayings Ken attributed to Fred Venturi. They puzzled her. “Ken's father was so quiet. He was simple. He said almost nothing. He was overwhelmed by his wife. Whenever I'd hear Ken quote his father, I'd think,
That doesn't sound like him to me
.”

Ken's own language, as Conni remembered it, could be rough. She said he used the most profane language when describing blacks, despite having good relationships with many of the African-American players on the circuit in the 1960s. In the 1970s, when Conni had a boyfriend who was an actor, she said Ken would sometimes ask her, “How's the little faggot?” Ken despised the acting profession. At the time of their engagement, Conni remembered Ken saying, “You have to choose: me or acting.”

I'm sure her feelings for Ken are far more complex than I could ever know. She never considered remarrying and said that part of her wishes they had stayed married so they could have raised their sons together. But she also said, “I have not shed one tear since Ken died. Isn't that strange?”

We were sitting at a Starbucks near her house when she said that. Her eyes were clear. She was a striking woman, tall and slender, with long white hair, and she emitted an artistic vibe. Maybe it was her turtleneck-and-vest combo. She looked like somebody you might see at a community theater, either on stage or selling fund-raiser coffee at intermission. It was a warm, windy day in late December, and the shop was filled with the music and decorations of Christmas. Conni was wearing a sweet, heavy department-store perfume. In her candor, she reminded me of Golf Ball. It was like both of them wanted the truth out. So many of the older people we saw on our legends tour—Arnold, Sandy Tatum, Chuck Will, Ball—had a certain what-the-hell quality. They were far more open than most people my own age, and I sadly include myself in that assessment. Conni talked about smoking pot in the 1970s, her health challenges, her struggles with money, motherhood, love, God.

Like Arnold, she had a language that was from a certain place and time. In the early seventies, Conni had a bit role in a Clint Eastwood movie,
Magnum Force
.

“How's Ken?” Eastwood asked Conni. Eastwood was a golfer, active in the game.

Conni was surprised he hadn't heard. “Ken went south,” she said. That is, he had split.

“Sorry,” Eastwood said. He helped Conni as she tried to find her way in the movie business. He arranged for her to have a small role in his next Dirty Harry movie. But Conni was already in her early forties, and her efforts in Hollywood didn't go far. In time, she returned to Napa and worked as a nanny and answered phones and took other jobs to make ends meet. She was active in local theater. She worked on her relationships with her sons. She showed me pictures of her four grandchildren and one great-grandchild. She was close to them all.

Ken and Conni had met as students at San Jose State. Over sixty years later, Conni was saying that she wished she could have been the wife Ken needed and wanted. But she couldn't. She could not be that little brown wren.

She never understood Ken's dispute with Arnold over the 1958 ruling at the Masters. “Do you know that from that Masters until we divorced in 1970, I never heard him mention any sort of rules issue with Arnold? The first I heard about it was when that book came out.

“Arnold and Ken were good friends. They'd go out together. The four of us would go out together. We had dinner on the Saturday night of the '60 Masters! The Palmers had girls who were the same ages as our sons. Winnie and I went to supermarkets together. We went to Laundromats together. She was one of my very good friends on tour.”

On tour, Conni called Arnold “Arnie.” During summer, the kids would come out, Arnie and Winnie's daughters, Kenny and Conni's sons, lots of other children. Nobody on tour traveled with a nanny, but an enterprising mother could find a Saturday-night babysitter now and again.

“I remember one week, we were in—where were we? Maybe Ohio. Timmy was just a baby and Matt was maybe four, so probably summer of '60. Everybody was staying in the same motel. It was a Saturday morning. Arnold's door was open. He was sitting on his bed, no shirt, just in his shorts, eating cereal out of a bowl, watching cartoons. Matt went down to his room, climbed up on that bed, and they watched cartoons together.”

What a picture. That was Arnie, sitting on that bed.

Conni told me she had written a condolence note to Arnold after Winnie died and other notes on two or three other occasions. But she had never heard back, and wondered if the letters ever reached him. I said I could get her Arnold's office address in Bay Hill or Latrobe. No, she said. She wasn't going down that road again. I said I could hand-deliver a letter to Arnold, if that was something she wanted.

Months later, Conni mailed me a package. It contained a picture of Ken and Conni with Ed Sullivan, taken a day or two before they went to see
Hello, Dolly!
There was a review she had written of a local theater production of
Annie Get Your Gun
. There was an eight-by-ten head shot of her with salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a sweater with a shawl collar, all held up by her stage name in capital letters:
CONSTANCE LORD
. There was a poem she had written for Matt and Tim in 1979. There was a dazzling black-and-white AP photo of Ken and Conni from the night he won the U.S. Open. The caption reads: “DOUBLE REWARD—Ken Venturi, winner of the National Open, gets a big kiss from his wife, Conni, as he accepts the title-holder's silver cup after a searing final round on the Washington Congressional Country Club course yesterday.”

This was 1964, when
man and wife
was still a boilerplate phrase of the American wedding vow. In that context, Ken was the king of golfdom. It was all right there in the snap: the shiny silver cup, the glamorous wife, the dazzling his-and-her smiles. Once that AP photo hit the next day's papers, the whole world would see: Ken Venturi had it all.

There was one more thing in the mailer: a small pink envelope from Conni, bound for Arnold, his name written in black ink in her feathery eighty-year-old hand.

For years, deep within the culture of a tour life that is long gone and nearly dead, there were people who thought the real reason Ken could not let go of Arnold was because of an affair Arnold and Conni supposedly had. “That was never true,” Conni said. “Never, never. Arnold wasn't even my type. If it were true, at this stage in my life, I'd admit it. I'd be proud to say that I had an affair with him. Why? Because he was such a gentleman. Not because he was Arnold Palmer. Because he was
Arnie
.”

As the great thespian said:
Inside, we're all seventeen, with red lips.